Wednesday, July 02, 2008

Peanut Butter Heaven

I made two peanut butter cookie recipes today, as I think it would be fun to test a bunch of different ones and see which is the best, basically like I'm doing with chocolate chip cookies as well. I'm having fun with this. Anna, at Cookie Madness gave me this recipe to try as she considers it her favorite peanut butter cookie. So today I made these and halved the recipe.

Roll dough into one inch balls (or whatever size you want) and place on baking sheets. I did the criss cross pattern with a fork, but you don't have to. The cookie stays puffy if you don't flatten with a fork, but is still great.

Bake for 12 minutes or until just browned around the edges. Remove from oven and cool on pan for five minutes before transferring to wire racks to cool.

I really liked these cookies. They weren't too sugary and had great peanutty flavor. The added nuts and chips were a great bonus. THEN---I was enticed by another recipe Anna passed on to me. This is supposed to be like the peanut butter cookies you remember as a kid. I remember crunchy peanut butter cookies, but I really like them soft, so I made sure not to bake these until they were crispy. I think that I really like them in their "pure" sense and not rolled in sugar. I like to taste the peanut butter taste more than sugar, like some recipes seem to be. I actually thought this recipe was quite similar in taste to the Triple Play ones, but I like these Old Fashioned Peanut Butter Cookies just a bit better as they are slightly more peanut buttery. I used Jif crunchy peanut butter for these and followed the recipe as that it does not call for extra peanuts. But I did slip in some peanut butter chips to bump up the peanut flavor. After baking half the batch, I also added some milk chocolate chips. They are good that way, but I decided I like them as just a true peanut butter cookie, without the chocolate (don't get me wrong--there's definitely a lot of times and places for chocolate otherwise!)

Roll dough into balls, place on baking sheet and flatten with a fork in criss cross pattern. Bake for 10-12 minutes. Let sit on baking sheet for 3 minutes, then remove to cooling rack.

These are yummy and sort of melt-in-your-mouth peanut buttery goodness. Both recipes are quite similar and both are great.

On a different note, at 7 o'clock last night, I was outside with Sam letting him play a bit and the other three boys came home from a neighbors house and asked if they could get wet. Here they are playing our special way--in the driveway. Have you heard of chiggers? We cannot play in the grass during the summer. It's quite a bummer, but after each of the boys (except Sam) have had chiggers invade them--and even I got a leg full here recently, just from standing in the flower bed wood chips for a few minutes to water the flowers--we just aren't taking any more chances by going in the grass. These little buggers are nasty, if you think you don't like a mosquito bite, this is worse! So enough complaining--I couldn't really get a decent shot of the boys playing with the hose, because even though they were each taking turns holding the hose, they were still yelling at each other about one thing or another the whole time. Sigh! Sam wasn't sure about the whole idea, but stayed close enough to keep getting wet.

Happy 4th! We're having some people over to EAT and I have no idea really what I'm doing yet. We usually make it simple and just grill burgers and hot dogs, but how boring is that? I have so many different cookies in the freezer, I could pull them out and have quite the cookie tray! I found a new recipe for some buttermilk cookies that will help me use up buttermilk that I bought and need to use. It has some great reviews at Allrecipes, so I think I'll try that next. Oh, if you only knew how many other things I've baked recently and just can't get it all posted. Sigh.

5 comments:

You know, I never bothered to look at the two recipes side by side. They are very alike! I think KA must have taken the Old Fashioned recipe and updated it by adding chips and changing the proportions a bit. I'm not sure. I just know that I made a batch of the Old Fashioned ones and added peanut butter chips. They were SO good and definitely had enough peanut butter flavor.

Hi Katrina,I'm so glad you stopped by my blog. I may have missed your scrumptious looking cookies. You may want a s'more right about now but, boy oh boy, (no pun intended:) those peanut butter cookies would sure go good with a tall glass of milk right now. I'm not much of a baker. I can't even begin to think about baking two recipes! Kudos to you!